


Nesting Instincts

by ivorygates



Series: Naquadaah Magnolia [3]
Category: Clan Mitchell - Fandom, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Backstory, Daniverse, Gen, Girl!Daniel, Houseporn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 23:06:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dani Jackson's life just before the Stargate Program.</p>
<p>Yes, it's houseporn.  Sue me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nesting Instincts

When she finished up in Chicago, she and Uncle Al had a serious talk, because she's been coming to him with everything she hasn't taken to Momma since she was nigh upon ten years old. He knows what she's been thinking. He's looked at her evidence. They both know evidence isn't proof, and there's one king hell of a lot of dinosaurs in their field that even proof wouldn't convince. All she can do by tilting at windmills is get her ass handed to her for a hat. (In all of this, Dani she doesn't know what Uncle Al -- or really, what Dr. Alvin deSaussure -- thinks of Dr. Jackson's theories. Family is Family and Business is Business, and Momma always told her that happy households come from knowing which is which and not mixing them, so she's never asked.)

But time enough (he tells her that summer) to fight any fights she's a mind to once she's got tenure and respectability and a University watching her back. He's never once steered her wrong, and she trusts him absolutely. They sort through a shortlist of possibles (Uncle Al's been keeping a list ever since she went off to Chicago) and shake out three. None of them in the Top Five, but all of them in the Top Twenty; Uncle Al tells her it's better to be a big frog in a small pond, and Momma's always said that too. When the dust settles, it's UCLA that's caught the bouquet.

So a year later she's living in Santa Monica (her department loves just about as much as she hated her apartment), which means anything from fifteen minutes to an hour door to door up I-10, but at least she has three alternate routes (fucking goddamned Californians) and her house is walking distance to the beach (half a mil to buy something the size of a fucking _trailer_ , but she was damned if she was going to spend her fucking goddamned life on the freeway the way Robert and Barbara did, and she could walk to the beach, and Uncle Al had said she wasn't wrong to buy, because real estate was just going to go up in this area). The place had been a shithole when she'd put her money down on it, and she'd thrown a tarp over the roof and prayed she could get a new one on by winter and all the Family had rotated in and out and she and Cindy Lou had dug up the handkerchief front yard and sieved all the dirt and then she'd put in geraniums because they were bright and pretty and it took nuclear war to kill them and then they'd done the same for the back yard, xeriscaping all the way but a couple of Japanese maples never hurt anybody. And a good tidge of the reason she'd bought the ranch-style bungalow (meaning it don't have a second floor, not that there's a damned bit of room in it anywhere) was for the fact it was the same design aesthetic as her born-parents' furniture (which she's been carting around to apartments ever since grad school, through all her rented spaces, but UCLA is where she's going to plant herself. For always, maybe). 

It still doesn't all fit (Dani wonders, sometimes, about the townhouse she only vaguely remembers; she has the photograph albums Momma made her up out of all the boxes of loose pictures, but there aren't a lot of pictures of her born-parents in America in it, and it's hard to get an idea of the places she lived with them from those fractured images), so she leaves the dining room table with Momma in order to put her piano and desk in the pocket dining-room. That means all of her entertaining is going to have to be done _al fresco_ , because after she gutted the kitchen to bring it into the 20th century, the breakfast nook and the pantry were casualties of war. She's just about got enough space in the corner of the kitchen for her little café table (seats two) and anybody else as comes to call had better be a good enough friend to eat standing up at the counter.

But the living room is gorgeous, at least half due to Megan Lee, who beat the bushes for Prairie School pieces to finish it up (and gave her the matched set of vases for her mantelpiece as a housewarming gift, and Dani's jaw was like to drop, because she knows damned well what those pieces go for, thank you kindly), and the other half due to Family, because even if she's paid for the missing tiles to fill out her hearth surround, and the kitchen backsplash, and the bathroom, its Family who've hunted them out for her. And no money on Earth could pay for the love in the hand-hooked rugs on her floors, or the piecework pillows on her chairs and her couch and her bed.

Megan Lee was the one who found her the remainder rolls of vintage wallpaper, too. Dani's painted the living room pale ochre (more light that way, and a period treatment) but she's papered the three bedrooms. 

The closets here suck, so she's taken the largest bedroom for a bedroom, and made the second largest one into her dressing room. The smallest is a guest room. It's barely ten by ten, so there's no room for _anything_ in it, but it's got a night table Daddy Mitchell made her, that's got room to store a lot of books, a really good reading lamp (Levinger's is her not-so-secret vice and has been for years; everybody in the Family knows it), and a comfortable bed of the day-bed sort so it can also be used as a couch. She's stuck an itty-bitty set of drawers -- Uncle Roy made her those for her apartment in Chicago -- into one corner of the incredibly tiny (and shallow) closet, and added a storebought fold-out rack in case her guest just wants to live out of his or her suitcase. The wallpaper in there is gray, with an all-over design of bunches of violets tied with a trailing blue ribbon. On the walls are some of her finds. She collects kitsch relating to Ancient Egypt (there's a pressed-glass Sphinx butter dish in the kitchen and a pair of Tut-head salt-and-pepper shakers, both from the 20's). She's framed up some postcards and some magazine ads here.

The wallpaper in her dressing room is deep green (Nile green, Megan Lee said) with a pattern on it of pink powder puffs and pairs of pink high-heeled pumps. The effect is oddly perverse. Her cats, Sapir and Whorf, stare at it for hours, which doesn't help matters in the least.

In her bedroom, the wallpaper is a pink as warm and pale as a "flesh" colored Band-Aid. It's covered with an exuberant and unlikely design of flowers that might be orchids, or possibly water lilies, highlighted in white, shadowed in burgundy, with fugitive accents of yellow.

It's a lovely house. It's a lovely life. (Megan Lee takes pictures for her show-book once they have all the finishing touches in place. She uploads them to the Family listserve, so of course everyone gets to see them. Cam mocks Dani unmercifully when he comes to visit her a month later and the place looks like a hooraw's nest. Dani tells him that if he looks like breathing _one damned word_ of any of this to Megan Lee he'll be one box of cookies short each month assuming she even lets him leave alive.)

#

**Author's Note:**

> There are a couple of pieces that come before this (Dani in Chicago, Simon Gardner getting his well-deserved comeuppance), but since I know zip about academic life, they need some tweaking before they're ready to post. At which time, this will become part five-or-six instead of three. It soothes my OCD to be able to renumber the parts of a series at whim, but it's probably very tedious for the rest of you...
> 
> Meanwhile: yes, I spent hours researching 20s wallpaper. Yes, there is even somewhere on line that sells rolls of original vintage wallpaper. Yes, all these descriptions come from that site. I have not, as yet, found a butter dish in the shape of the Sphinx, but surely there's one out there?
> 
> As for why Dani has all this Prairie School furniture and is decorating to match, take a look at Daniel's apartment in "The Light". That is by-damn a Mission couch Jack is walking by, and seriously: nobody picks up this stuff on a whim.
> 
> The reason it's headcanon of mine that it's his parents' furniture is complicated, but it all comes down to: nobody becomes an Egyptologist just to have a good time, especially in Melburne Jackson's generation (for a good time, yeah, but it also takes BUCKS, because there isn't much of a living in it, so I'm told...) So I'm presuming there was _some_ money in the family, and once that coverstone came down, some insurance company somewhere was going to be writing a big check. Even if their eight-year-old offspring vanished from the funeral (in Dani's case) or went to a foster family (in Daniel's), nobody just made a bonfire of the Jacksons' worldly goods. So... THE GLORIES OF THE PRAIRIE SCHOOL ARE THEIRS!! :::cackles evolly:::
> 
> Yeah, my tastes in furniture should not be a secret to you by this point....


End file.
